Friday, April 08, 2005

Foreign Affairs pop quiz

So I had a little fun last night, and played WorldQuest with the Maine Council on World Affairs. My Latin America expertise came in handy at a few points, but it also highlighted out a glaring blind spot for me.

Ready to play? No cheating:
Ellen Gracie Norfleet is most well-known as....

a) the first female admiral in the Canadian Navy
b) the president of UNIFEM
c) the first female justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court
d) the provost of the United Nations University
The answer is here.

How about this one:
How are North and South Korea most dissimilar:

a) literacy rate
b) population
c) life expectancy
d) (can't remember)
After arguing against an emerging consensus that it must be literacy (based on my Latin American experience that socialist countries do quite a good job on that score), the answer turned out to be: b) population. In other words, in social-economic terms the two countries are not all that dissimilar.

Okay, so getting back to the first question, if Randy Paul is out there anywhere, could you please recommend a couple of books for me to brush up on Brazil basics? I also thought Brazil might be the top exporter of cocoa in the world. After all, in recent years all those yummy Brazilian chocolates turned up in Salvadoran supermarkets.

The answer: Ivory Coast. (Note: they also use child slaves to harvest cocoa beans.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

life expectancy is comparable even after all those folks died from famine in the 90s? or maybe that accounts for the difference in population . . . -- max

Anonymous said...

South and North Korea are very different socioeconomically. "Literacy" and "life-expectancy" are only two of many indicators for social and economic development. For example, Cuba has a high literacy rate, life-expectancy, and health care system. But very few people would consider Cuba developed and on par with other western nations